On Tuesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced that it’s now gearing up to tackle the latest completely absurd troll, which claims to have invented podcasting.

The company in question, Personal Audio LLC, has not sold a product since 1998—it appears to make money entirely by suing companies and compelling them to license its patents. In January 2013, Personal Audio sued a few big-name podcasts, including the Adam Carolla Show and the Stuff You Should Know podcasts.

As Dave Winer, one of podcasting’s co-inventors, wrote Tuesday on Twitter: “How could a patent issued in 2012 cover podcasting, a technology that's been around since 2001?”

Patent 8,112,504 claims to be a “system for disseminating media content representing episodes in a serialized sequence,” or what Personal Audio LLC itself refers to as the “podcast patent.” Despite the patent not having been issued until 2012, the company argues it has a “precursor to podcasting,” which was filed in a different form back in 1996 but then eventually led to this patent. That also probably explains why the ‘504 patent refers to obviously outdated technology like Windows 95 and SLIP/PPP dialup. It cites infrared as “rapidly becoming a standard feature [on PCs]” and Mosaic as a “conventional web browser.”

This isn’t the first time Personal Audio has filed a patent troll lawsuit. Using various other patents, it has gone up against Apple, Samsung, Research in Motion, Motorola, and HTC—and managed to win $8 million against Apple back in 2011.

If you’re a podcaster who has been hit with a letter from Personal Audio, the EFF wants to help.

“We think there are more of you out there than you realize. EFF would like to understand how big the problem is and make sure you’re all in touch with each other,” wrote Julie Samuels, a staff attorney, and the EFF’s Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents. “We can also help you find counsel. If you’ve heard from Personal Audio, please send us an email at podcasting@eff.org.”

Good to hear that there are people out there trying to help the average content creator.

Companies like Personal Audio seem to make producing a successful creative endeavor a risky proposition.

Has this always been the cost of doing business? I have heard it said that a successful system will inevitably attract parasites. Of course that concerning actual biological parasites - but I like to think it applies.

It seems like I could by what i have been reading lately.If you have a good pitch on bull crap you can patent and sue for it.Wow what a shame the patent office is so uneducated on technology.Any scammer can get one, which makes their scam not a scam.Its a legalized mafia

I'm pretty sure this is a really good example of how badly the system is broken. I doubt that even the "it works fine" crowd can't explain why an application in 2009 is allowed to patent a common method of podcasting from 2001.

I mean, really? USPTO does not do prior art checks at all, if the prior art was not patented. USPTO is a failure of an organisation.

I'm pretty sure this is a really good example of how badly the system is broken. I doubt that even the "it works fine" crowd can't explain why an application in 2009 is allowed to patent a common method of podcasting from 2001.

I mean, really? USPTO does not do prior art checks at all, if the prior art was not patented. USPTO is a failure of an organisation.

The Patent has a priority date back to 1996. The patent has a length 20 years from that date so it will expire in 2016.

I'm pretty sure this is a really good example of how badly the system is broken. I doubt that even the "it works fine" crowd can't explain why an application in 2009 is allowed to patent a common method of podcasting from 2001.

I mean, really? USPTO does not do prior art checks at all, if the prior art was not patented. USPTO is a failure of an organisation.

The Patent has a priority date back to 1996. The patent has a length 20 years from that date so it will expire in 2016.

This meas the USPTO would have to find art prior to 1996 not 2001.

Oh... FFS! Again more proof that how the system is f***ed up. In 2009 the examiner has to make a call based on a smaller amount of information(to be precice, searching a larger pool of information with the same time available results in a smaller amount of information gathered per patent) than his predecessor in 1996

It seems like I could by what i have been reading lately.If you have a good pitch on bull crap you can patent and sue for it.Wow what a shame the patent office is so uneducated on technology.Any scammer can get one, which makes their scam not a scam.Its a legalized mafia

Only if you add something innovative to the act of defecation.

I am, I think, going to patent a device or method for the consuming online or stored data while engaging in defecatory activities. Like to read your ebook reader/tablet/phone/other electronic device while pooping? You owe me money!

How is podcasting a technology? It's a standard audio file in an RSS feed that's marked played/not played. How the fuck did playing a music file and using an RSS feed together get granted a patent in 2012!?

While an admirable goal, POTUS cannot simply direct anyone to do anything as regards patents. The Patent and Trademark Office operates as authorized by Congress. I'd imagine it will require either an Act thereof or a ruling by the Supreme Court to change this.

I'm going to get a patent for patent lawsuits and stop all of these once and for all.

Careful. I already have a patent for a method of filing patents related to submitting legal documents regarding patents. Your patent itself will be valid, but you will have to pay me royalties in order to file it.

Podcasting always seemed to me to be a fancy name for a radio talk show or commentary, except it's "on the internet".

If a radio commentary show can be considered "prior art", then Paul Harvey is prior art dating back as far back as the 1950s.

Heck, "The Jack Benny Program" began in 1932 which should qualify as an example of a “system for disseminating media content representing episodes in a serialized sequence." Radio certainly qualifies as a “system for disseminating media content."

When was the application made? The Australian patenting the wheel did it to demonstrate the rubberstamping of applications. The turn around was about a month. Not sure how this is different but I thought it was 2009 --- not sure where from I got that source.

I'm pretty sure this is a really good example of how badly the system is broken. I doubt that even the "it works fine" crowd can't explain why an application in 2009 is allowed to patent a common method of podcasting from 2001.

I mean, really? USPTO does not do prior art checks at all, if the prior art was not patented. USPTO is a failure of an organisation.

The Patent has a priority date back to 1996. The patent has a length 20 years from that date so it will expire in 2016.

This meas the USPTO would have to find art prior to 1996 not 2001.

The patent back in 1996 has none of claims to what a podcast really is or does. Only later does it have it. For example, the current patent mentions predefined URLs, what we use for podcast addresses; none of that is mentioned in the 1996 filing nor in the 2001 filing (wonder why )

Lawyers and the justice industry are at least partly to blame for the misuse of an otherwise weak system. The patenting process has to be updated for sure but in the meantime, a little discipline for those blood-suckers would be welcome. There ought to be consequences to profiting from legal extortion.

Huh. Looking at that patent, it doesn't actually seem to cover standard podcasts. It explicitly describes program *segments* which people can subscribe to based on category, with people able to skip individual segments. This would suggest that you can subscribe to specific chunks of podcasts based on what subject they cover in that segment and have a custom radio show built out of that, but without a client side program with that feature to deal with it (and I'm not aware of any that do) you can't even filter podcast *episodes* in this way. Different podcasts aren't "segments", they're separate shows, so this wouldn't seem to match up.

Also, the podcast is a set stream of episodes which doesn't change based on user, and the only way to get bespoke feeds is for the user to add more feeds on the client side, you don't just subscribe to "gaming podcasts" and it produces a playlist with anything in this category. Since the patent clearly describes a server side system which produces custom playlists based on a category, the fact that the management of podcasts is done on the client side and requires manual curation by the user to select which shows to listen to means that again, this isn't the same thing.

I'm pretty sure this is a really good example of how badly the system is broken. I doubt that even the "it works fine" crowd can't explain why an application in 2009 is allowed to patent a common method of podcasting from 2001.

I mean, really? USPTO does not do prior art checks at all, if the prior art was not patented. USPTO is a failure of an organisation.

The Patent has a priority date back to 1996. The patent has a length 20 years from that date so it will expire in 2016.

This meas the USPTO would have to find art prior to 1996 not 2001.

It would also have to pass a more important test, the obvious test. If my account hadn't been eventually purged two years after I graduated with my masters in '96, I could supply prior art. But it wasn't patentable back then because it was obvious, an extension of the ability to record a video and carry along the theme. That's television, but prior art to that was radio. If you must have computer recordings, themselves non internet based one was the all time best selling game even before that point in 1996. Just doing these "on the net" is not sufficient to warrant a patent. Sex isn't patentable; sex on the internet isn't either. A news broadcast isn't patentable. A news broadcast on the internet isn't either. And that is essentially what a podcast amounts to......sex and news on the internet. Okay, maybe not sex in all podcasts......

Personal Audio sued a few big-name podcasts, including the Adam Corolla Show, and the Stuff You Should Know podcasts.

Heh. I was just listening to the Adam Carolla podcast where he was ranting about the incorrect spelling of his last name. How topical!

You mean almost every episode recently. Seems like a lot of journalists and marquee guys aren't doing their due diligence and taking five seconds to Google search his name.

And there's also that pesky problem of their actually being a place named Coralla, which spell checkers know, and a car named Corolla, which spell checkers know, and only a last name of Carolla, which spell checkers want to change to Cadillac. He's lucky they get it close.

1. Fire the patent office and hire people who know how to do their job ...2. Stick the owners of the company in prison under the formula of (no. of years = $$$ made on extortion).

Real simple ....

Can you outline precisely what their job actually is (and not what we'd like it to be)? Each person may well be doing exactly what it is they're supposed to, but the laws and management are broken.

Oh, they certainly are. The problem is just like the rest of the laws, the people working at the patent office don't understand ambiguous technology patents and the system designed to support it hasn't been updated to match technological advances.

1. Fire the patent office and hire people who know how to do their job ...2. Stick the owners of the company in prison under the formula of (no. of years = $$$ made on extortion).

Real simple ....

Can you outline precisely what their job actually is (and not what we'd like it to be)? Each person may well be doing exactly what it is they're supposed to, but the laws and management are broken.

Oh, they certainly are. The problem is just like the rest of the laws, the people working at the patent office don't understand ambiguous technology patents and the system designed to support it hasn't been updated to match technological advances.

I remember another poster in another thread stating that patent examiners have a daily quota to fill (primarily introduced to reduce their backlog) to do their job "properly" and thus don't have the necessary time to do a proper search for prior art, obviousness and/or existing patents that are "too close". So essentially the patent office has been reduced to just rubber stamping patents and pushing the actual validity checks onto courts, which is a very sad state of affairs.

The people at Personal Audio want to eat our bread without doing their fair share of work for it. Even in prehistoric times it was common for the tribe to want to murder people who did this. That's why we have evolved to be co-operative and to share because we have killed off the genes that didn't. I think we should put Personal Audio in a zoo, they are such fascinating throwbacks. But I don't think we should let them breed.